I watched the Tom Cruise remake of War of the Worlds this past weekend with my brother-in-law. It wasn’t very good. To be fair, there was never much to work with: Wells’ original novella didn’t have much of a plot, and the only protagonists were aliens whose perspective was never shared with the reader. (This is not to say it wasn’t a good read! Wells describes human helplessness that Lovecraft never matched, by showing rather than telling.) The once shocking idea of alien conquerors has lost some of its power through repetition; at the time, War of the Worlds was shocking because it dared to suggest that aliens would colonize us rather than joining Africans, Indians, and others that Victorian adventure fiction took by definition as inferiors rightfully subject to imperial rule. Plus, the audience already knows how the story ends: earth, unable to defeat the aliens on the battlefield, is saved when the martians all catch some horrible earth disease and die to a…er, man.
So to maintain some drama, the movie transforms the martians from conquerors to movie monsters, the kind that exist only to pop up whenever things get quiet and go booga-booga at the camera. And, of course, to eat humans and possibly mate with our women. To fill in the long gap between the martians’ terrifying arrival and ultimate demise by microbe, the movie adds a tedious subplot, in which Tom Cruise plays a good-for-nothing father who rises to the occasion, saving his children when the chips are down, regaining the respect of his divorced wife and her new husband.
That basic premise of the movie, that you can be lazy and irresponsible towards your family but still qualify as a good dad by being willing to defend them when the chips are down, is disturbingly common in disaster movies. It’s even more disturbingly popular in real life, mostly among authoritarian and/or good-for-nothing fathers, and deserves to be put down like a dangerous and terminally sick dog.
Your kids don’t need to be saved from martians, or falling meteors, or rogue KGB agents with a mad plan to ignite nuclear war by seizing a missile silo in Nebraska and using your kids as hostages while they work out the launch codes. There are no martians, meteors, or KGB agents. (And if there were, you wouldn’t be able to save anyone from them anyway. You’d be a casualty, not some idealized Bruce Willis-style hero.)
Your kids need help with their homework. They need help tying their shoes and blowing their noses and eating their vegetables. They need love and attention and instruction and good examples, day after day. That’s what makes a good father. Letting all that slide, and waiting for the martian invasion that will never come to prove familial devotion, makes a bad father.
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